I have been sitting with this question, turning it over the way you turn over a stone you found in the water, not quite sure what you are looking for, only that something about it asks to be held. I work in leadership and organizational development, and this question lives at the center of that work. And it lives just as fully in the rest of my life. In families, in friendships, in the quiet human longing to be genuinely known. It may be the most universal ache there is, and among the most mysterious.

In June 2019, I found myself driving down the long peninsula of Mani in the Peloponnese. I had just moved to Athens after working for a few years in India, and I was on summer holiday, drawn to rugged terrain and a remote coastline, both culturally unfamiliar to me, and close enough to reach by rental car. I stayed without a plan, drawn forward by the particular delight of exploring a place I was only just beginning to call home.

πυργόσπιτα (Towers)

Mani is one of the most striking and isolated regions of Greece, a rugged finger of land jutting into the Mediterranean between the Messenian and Laconian gulfs. The landscape is stark, almost lunar in places, with dry limestone, scrubby vegetation, and dramatic coastal cliffs. It has a raw, elemental beauty that feels quite different from the lush or touristic parts of Greece.

The Maniots famously resisted Ottoman rule more successfully than in almost any other region of Greece and played a significant role in the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s. They had a reputation as proud, warlike, and deeply clan-oriented people, and for centuries, rival clans engaged in prolonged blood feuds that sometimes lasted generations. This history is written into the architecture.

Families built their homes vertically rather than spreading outward, because height was a tactical advantage: you could defend against attackers from above while being harder to breach from the ground. The towers also signaled status, and the taller the tower, the more prestige the clan commanded. Over time, they became so characteristic of the region that they define its visual identity entirely, giving Mani villages a skyline that looks almost medieval Italian in places, all vertical stone rising from bare rock.

There is something both heartbreaking and recognizable about this. The towers are a monument to what happens when the longing for safety overwhelms the longing for connection. When we stop trying to see each other and start trying to outlast each other instead.

Each morning, I would wake and sit outside on the patio for breakfast. The owner, an old man, would ask what my plan was for the day. I would ask what he recommended. He eagerly brought out old paper maps and showed me where the secret beaches were, and which small villages had churches I could step inside. He handed me snorkeling equipment and told me which coves offered water clear as glass, where I might spot octopus moving along the bottom.

I felt welcomed as a guest of their homeland, honored with inside knowledge. This is one of the gifts of traveling alone: you are invited into the family of a place, looked after differently than a tourist passing through. It helped, too, that Greece was my new home. I was a new neighbor, in a sense, someone who might return.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, who wrote about Mani with the devotion of someone who had found a second home there, noted that in ancient Greek the words for stranger and guest are the same: ξένος. I felt that morning what he must have meant.

What Looks Back

I went looking for the octopus. I floated in water so clear it seemed impossible, looking down through what felt like glass at the rocky floor below. I saw ancient pottery resting on the bottom, still and patient as if it had simply decided to stay there, and I stayed with that for a long time, astonished. But I did not see an octopus.

And yet I wonder now whether one was there. An octopus can flatten itself against a surface and become almost indistinguishable from the texture around it, not hiding exactly, but so thoroughly present in its environment that it dissolves into the world around it. It sees with extraordinary precision. It may well have been watching me while I searched, while I looked directly at the place it was and saw only rock and light and water.

This image is almost unbearably interesting, not exactly as a metaphor, but as a fact about the nature of seeing. We can only see what we can see. Our sight is shaped by what we expect, what we have been taught to look for, and what our particular vantage point makes available to us. And so much of reality, so much of what is genuinely present and alive and right there, remains just outside the edge of what we can make out.

This is what I mean when I say we can become lost in our attempts to reach for a shared reality. It is not that we are not trying. It is not that the other person is not there. It is that we are each floating in the same water with different eyes, different histories, different ways of seeing, and what is plainly visible to one of us can be completely invisible to another.

In organizational life, I have watched this happen in rooms full of people of tremendous goodwill. A team carries an unspoken agreement about who is allowed to speak and who defers, and no one can quite see it because it has become the water they swim in. A community carries an old wound that shapes every new conversation, and two people can leave the same meeting with entirely different experiences of what just occurred.

What strikes me is that shared reality may not begin with agreement at all, but with the humbling recognition that the other person may be seeing something you cannot see.

The question I began with may not even have an answer. What Mani gave me was something older and more immediate than an answer: the particular nourishment of losing yourself in a place both wild and ancient, somehow magical, entirely new, in its landscape, its water, its stories, its people.

I have been listening to Giorgos Kakosaios, a Greek singer whose music I first discovered during my time living in Athens. In Ποια Είναι Αυτή, he sings about longing for a soulmate, for someone to share a life with. It is a universal ache, the kind that needs no translation, and there is no resolution in it, only the longing itself, held with a kind of beauty that makes the aching feel worthwhile. This may be what we are reaching for when we long for shared reality, not just alignment or understanding, but the experience of being truly known by another person, of briefly inhabiting the same interior world. Somewhere beneath the reaching, we know how rare and extraordinary that is when it happens.

We may never arrive at a single shared reality. And yet, I continue to learn how to be in intimate relationship with the beautiful mystery of it, each moment shifting into a new sensation of what is real, each one inviting us to hold still, look carefully, and remain open to what is present, even when we cannot quite make out its shape.

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Melissa George, Ph.D., is a leadership coach, organizational consultant, and writer based in Chico, California. She has spent over two decades working and living across seven countries, and those years of navigating unfamiliar places, languages, and cultures are what draw her to the kinds of questions this publication explores. Her work focuses on helping leaders in education, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations develop the inner capacity to lead well through complexity and change. She loves to connect with readers, near and far. She also writes a weekly publication called Grounding Leadership, in which she explores leadership, human development, and the inner lives of people trying to do good work in the world. You can follow her work at melissageorge.substack.com.

Grounding Leadership

Exploring leadership, organizational development, and the practice of leading well.

By Melissa George

Sorting through an old box of childhood keepsakes recently, I came across a piece I wrote in 1990, when I was twelve years old.

Why I Like Slugs

I like slugs. I like slugs because they are fun to watch. Most people don’t like slugs. Slugs are fun to watch, especially the Banana Slugs.

Slugs are also very slimy. And the other thing that is really neat, is when you find one. Some have patterns of different colors. Their colors are mostly yellow, black, or gray. The thing I really like though, is to just sit and watch them for a long time and see what they do.

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Reading it now, I am struck by how simple the piece is. And on an abstract level, I connect with this writing as a philosophy about the goodness that comes with slowing down in life.

It can be mesmerizing to watch things that move as slow as a slug. To imagine what their experience might be like, as compared to a human.

I’m also struck by how finding a Banana slug seemed to be part of the fun. Finding something rare and unique can feel exciting, especially the younger child within us. Banana Slugs are not everywhere, unless of course you are in a certain environment where they are everywhere. There are also environments where they most certainly would not live, let alone survive!

My old piece of writing, on binder paper, no less, is also as rare a finding. After all, at my age, and after so many international moves around the world, I had all but forgotten that I even had childhood mementos stored as keepsakes. My mom happily delivered the old, dusty tubs of objects from her basement within weeks of landing in my own place here in Northern California.

Every now and then I like to comb through and shed objects that I don't care to keep any longer. Old baby teeth left out for the tooth fairy, cards from friends I don't even remember, memorabilia already passed on from parents and grandparents.

Lately, I've come to realize that my legacy is taking on more of a center stage in my daily life. What will I leave behind in this world when I am gone? How can I live in a way that honors just how precious and fragile this one life is?

The Banana slug offers me a hopeful symbol, and a reminder, that slowing down in observation and in being is a return to our true home in the world, appreciating the special relationships we share with our beyond human friends in the world.

Imagine peace.

Stay with me a while.

Imagine children feeling loved by their parents.

Loved by their sisters and brothers.

Truly seen

and not made the reason for another's pain.

valued

appreciated

loved

Imagine this and all that becomes possible,

when we love each other from a place of having been loved enough.

How we return to the ground and move slowly,

allowing our wounds to heal,

with companionship in this tender terrain.

Who am I now, loved enough?

Imaginary peace is my real peace,

of mind, heart, and soul.

Meet me here.

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Today is my 48th birthday.

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Getting into the race itself was the first challenging hurdle. It filled up in one minute. I signed up right at the exact minute it opened and only made the waiting list. A group of us wanted to do it together, but only a few of us managed to register. A week later, I was offered a spot.

Preparing for the Longest Run

I trained for the past few months so that my body would be ready — not just the muscles and the miles, but the mind and something deeper too — for the experience of running 33 miles with 5,000 feet of elevation gain.

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I was wrapping up a course in Cosmogenetic Experience with Dr. Brian Swimme and others at the Deeptime Network, a community exploring the story of the universe as a living, evolving whole. Ezekiel Fugate began our Zoom session with a song, as he often did.

I later looked up the artist: Cosmo Sheldrake, a UK-based composer and field recordist who makes music with the living world: birds, whales, fish, frogs, fungi.

[Play this video and song before reading on.]

The colorful images of fish swimming to the beat almost make them feel human, characters with personalities, lives, and interior worlds.

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I have been home for a while now, and it feels right.

Thirteen years. Six countries. Beginning anew, so many times, that it became its own kind of fluency. The way you eventually stop translating and simply begin to think in another language.

Looking back now, maybe what was quietly happening in the background all along was a preparation for returning home.

I am drawn to beginnings. I always have been.

Departures feel like spring. There is a ticket, a plan, a clear sense of direction. There is the romance of the threshold, the clean drama of the new. The world opens. People lean in when you say, I am going. And for those of us who seek novelty, who feel most alive at the edge of the unfamiliar, leaving can feel like arriving at something. Full of promise. Full of possibility.

Sometimes, returning is the more vulnerable act.

You arrive back at the place you came from and discover that the journey home moves in a different direction, toward something that can feel, if you are not careful, like an ending. And endings carry their own weather. Grief. Loss. The quiet closing of doors you did not know were still open.

And so you swim. Not the easy downstream glide, the warm welcome, the familiar faces, the food that tastes exactly right. The other kind. The upstream kind. Against a current with no name. Against the assumption that you simply slide back into the shape you left, against your own longing for that to be true.

What I have come to learn, slowly, imperfectly (whatever that means), with some resistance, is how to live inside the tension between the two.

Beginnings and endings are not opposites. They are parts of the same cycle. One cannot exist without the other. Spring is no more alive than autumn. Departure is no more meaningful than return. They belong to each other, the way the journey out and the journey home belong to each other — not held so far apart, but understood as part of the same unfolding.

Salmon know this. They swim out, and they swim back. They live the whole arc.

I am living the same now, too.

There is something else worth knowing about salmon. The transition between salt water and fresh water is not simple. It takes enormous energy. As a species, they have learned to adapt, to live within vastly different worlds, biologically transformed by each one.

And the upstream journey — the one that matters most — they make it without eating. Not a single meal. They carry everything they need from the ocean stored inside them, and when they finally arrive, they give it all back. Their bodies feed the river, the forest, the bears, the birds. The returning salmon doesn’t just complete its own journey. It nourishes everything around it.

I recognize this. Each time I moved, something in me adapted. I changed to meet the environment, and the environment changed me in return. I learned to draw on my surroundings as a resource, letting each place shape me rather than resisting it. And in doing so, I became a resource too — for the people around me, for the communities I moved through, for the work I was there to do.

That capacity did not disappear when I came home. It came with me.

And here is what I want you to understand about living somewhere that isn’t your country: you still live.

You still wake up thirsty. You still burn the onions. You still carry groceries up four flights of stairs, arms aching, keys jangling, mind cataloging what you forgot at the market. The big, exotic life of someone living abroad is also just life. Full of the ordinary. Full of Tuesday.

And yet Tuesday in Jakarta feels nothing like Tuesday in Casablanca, which feels nothing like Tuesday in Athens. The ordinary is different everywhere, made of different light, different sounds, a different logic of queuing and greeting, and whether being on time is something important or not.

You learn each cultural ecosystem. And each one offers something deeper to discover. About yourself. About others. About the world.

What I do not expect, each time: that returning asks the same of me. That it is its own departure — from the accumulated self, the layered self, the self who has grown so fluent in elsewhere.

For a long time, I think that I feared coming home. Feared that it would change me. Not the way travel changes you, expansively, willingly. But the way this place once had. Before I knew I had a choice. This was not always a gentle place for me. It did not offer me the easiest beginning. And I nearly didn’t make it to the ocean at all.

The salmon, I imagine, must feel something like this. The pull of origin. The fear that the river it came from might be too strong.

Mark Kurlansky, writes in his study of salmon that what keeps coming up is the word obstinacy, a rare and unconquerable determination. They circle below waterfalls and dams, trying over and over again. They do not give up. They do not turn back.

What no one tells you about going home is that it is also a kind of leaving.

I come back to California, to the land where my living relatives grow older in real time rather than in photographs, to the country where I am born and first understand words, and feel underneath the genuine gladness of return a quiet grief I do not have a name for.

It takes me a while to find the name.

It is this: when you live deeply in many places, you accumulate selves. Not fragmented ones. Not a self that is broken. But layered ones. The self who knows how to read the mood of a souk. The self who makes friends in four languages at once. The self who is never quite foreign and never quite local, and has made a kind of art of that in-between.

Those selves come home with me.

And here, in the familiar, they do not disappear. They blossom. This is who I am now. Present, in this one body.

It is this: the world I return to has no container for what I have become. And so I become the container. This, too, is its own creative process.

And so I swim against its assumptions, its reasonable, well-meaning, completely insufficient assumptions, about who I must be. About what home must mean. About how long the adjustment should reasonably take.

But I come to understand: this resistance is not a sign that something has gone wrong.

It is a sign that the journey did what journeys do.

You cannot travel that far, that long, through that much, and come back the same. The river may feel the same. The swimmer is not. And maybe the river isn’t the same either. And that gap, that beautiful, difficult gap, is not a problem to be solved. It is the transformation itself.

The salmon and the river are not separate. They never were. It is only the human mind that imagines the boundary between them. They are one living system, always endeavoring in the deep time dance of being and becoming.

Someone asked me recently if it feels good to be home.

I say yes, because it does. It is complicated, because it is.

The fear I carry, across the Pacific, through customs, up the long road back to the valley, is that return means regression. That home is a before, and I have become an after, and the two cannot hold each other.

The fear is not only about the country. It is about the people in it. The ones who knew me before. Who may want me to return to a version of myself I no longer am. Who may not have room for the boundaries I have learned, the self I have grown into, the belonging I now know I deserve.

But that is not what happens.

What happens is quieter. Stranger. More like grace.

The journey out asks me to expand. The journey home asks me to integrate. To carry all of it, the jasmine in Morocco and the marigolds in India, the languages I learn to love before I learn to leave, and bring it here. Into the ordinary. Into the Tuesday of this particular life.

That is the transformation the salmon knows.

Kurlansky reminds us that the salmon does not simply return to the same river. It returns to the very same stretch of gravel where it was born, the same crook in the same stream, thousands of miles and years away. Scientists still cannot fully explain how. Solar navigation, the Earth’s magnetic field, memory, smell — perhaps all of these, perhaps something else entirely. The knowing defies complete explanation. But the salmon finds its way home anyway, with a precision that crosses the entire ocean.

It does not return to the place it left. It returns to the place it was always becoming.

Here is what I have come to trust:

The salmon doesn’t arrive because the journey was easy. It arrives because the knowing was always inside it, older than the current, older than the distance, older than all the years away. Something in the body that says: this way. keep going. You know this water even when it pushes against you.

Something old is releasing. Something new is stirring. I embrace both, gently. This is what the salmon has always known. That the return is not an ending. That the cycle, in completing itself, becomes an act of grace. That we, like the salmon, are never separate from the world that holds us. That the body knows the way home, even when the mind is still learning to trust it.

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Melissa George writes near and far — musings on travel, culture, and being human.

Reference

Kurlansky, M. (2020). Salmon: A fish, the earth, and the history of their common fate. Patagonia Books.

The airport was enormous, and the air inside it was not quite air. A low cloud of smog had settled along the corridors leading to immigration, softening the fluorescent light into something almost amber.

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Some of us are tourists, and some of us are travellers. I’ll let you sit with the differences between the two and the commonalities they share.

In today’s world, photography — and videography, for that matter — are far more pervasive than they’ve ever been. Anyone can instantly livestream their experience and share it worldwide. Just the other day, I was showing my nephew a recent video that some friends took of their safari in Africa. He delighted in seeing the lions, giraffes, and elephants on my iPhone.

That’s right.

There have been many stellar photos I wanted to take, the frame clear and compelling for the capture. And yet instinctively, in each of these moments, there was a knowing that it would actually ruin the image, the experience, and the magic of the moment. Sometimes it would have compromised the image altogether—or blown my cover as a traveller trying to blend into the scene.

So what do you believe about traveling to a new place in the world? And how does it shape your experience?

What follows are selected photos from my travels. Before you look at each one, try to imagine being there — what I was experiencing, what drew me in, and what invited me to finally click the photo.

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Years ago, I picked up a book called Almost French. (It’s a must-read, by the way.)

I hadn’t yet travelled to France, but my roommate at the time was French. It was post-divorce, and I had put an ad out on Craigslist for a roommate. This is how I came to meet Marion, from Nantes. She barely spoke a word of English when she arrived to

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Five years ago, I was living in Morocco.

It was this same time of year, mid-March, that I drove to the Atlas Mountains for the first time. In my brown Fiat Panda, I caravanned behind friends as far as Marrakesh, then headed down the road solo. Driving in another country offers a whole other level of independence and freedom, especially when there is a language barrier. It can also carry certain risks. I was aware of my own vulnerability as I ventured into new terrain.

Within my first few months of living in Rabat, I heard from a few other colleagues about their trek to Jebel Toubkal. It sounded like a special challenge — hiking to the top of North Africa’s highest peak at 4,167 meters.

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I was eighteen when a teacher said this to our class, and I remember the way the words landed on me, light as a leaf, easy to brush off. I didn’t see myself staying anywhere for the rest of my days. I was too young to know where home would unfold, or that it might not be a single place at all.

Connecting with the land

I can still remember my first run in Upper Bidwell Park, scrambling over the rocky trails with a classmate from my drawing class, the canyon opening up below us like a secret the land had been keeping. My lungs burned. My legs ached. I felt completely alive.

Most of my runs were in Lower Park, through the shaded trails I could reach easily from campus. The woodpeckers cried out above me in the tall oaks and sycamores, and over time their sound became something I didn't just hear but knew, the way you

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I’m working on something new — a space for stories about the places we go, the places we stay, and everything in between.

Near and far is launching soon. Sign up and I’ll let you know when we’re live.

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